Bringing the experiments to life
The benefit of conducting these experiments within an advertising agency was having the capability to spin them into a compelling story. Everything was filmed and, armed with this footage, they asked the creative team to write a script for the film. In an inspired move, they positioned the film as a 1970s-era, BBC-style behavioural science programme. Rory, with his RP accent, was the perfect candidate to narrate the tongue-in-cheek script.
Once the Succulent Carrots had been eaten, magic pixie dust floated across the screen where they’d disappeared. CCTV footage of people walking back to their desks after the airline briefing was sped up for comic effect. Everyone bouncing like bunnies looked stupid enough without need for much further editing. And the anonymous takers of their sexual preferences survey were filmed in a prison-style line-up panning from left to right, only to reveal the identity of the shortest guy in the office.
They had conducted their studies, had a film to tell the story and were finally ready to tell the rest of the agency about their new behavioural planning practice. The company meeting was to be held at the Old Vic theatre, near London’s Southbank. After the usual updates on company performance, awards and promotions, they were allotted a segment to talk about the launch of the new practice. To bring it to life, Jez and Rachel Hatton, the Group Planning Director, donned long white lab coats to take to the stage and introduce the film.
The reaction? People were laughing, engaged and wanted to know more. The people in the film were also in the audience, so they couldn’t deny that their behaviour had been changed. This was quite a breakthrough which helped people to understand how they’d work with clients. After the meeting, people approached Jez asking to join the team and within a week they had their first brief.
Do it yourself: a toolkit for bringing behavioural science to life
In order to make behavioural science practical and relatable, it’s important to go beyond telling an anecdote. You want to demonstrate the results in a tangible way. Of course, it’s always interesting to hear about the results of experiments by behavioural researchers, but this doesn’t necessarily translate into clear recommendations in the business world.
That being said, rest assured that the task is made slightly easier by the fact that behavioural science is all about humans. Everybody can relate to it, once you’ve found a way to make it relevant for them.
#1 Get a local proof point
When you bring behavioural science to life for people in their line of work, they start to buy into it more. If you take a behavioural bias or heuristic and find a way to make it local to them, that’s when people start to understand the wide range of applications and merits. To do this, conduct a small experiment or case study within your organisation, in order to get a local proof point. Naturally, the type of proof point you need will depend on the nature of your business.
For example, you might run a small experiment to get more people recycling. You might take your two waste bins titled ‘Mixed Recycling’ and ‘General Waste’, and re-label them to ‘Mixed Recycling’ and ‘Landfill’. You might go one step further and make the landfill slot smaller, so that it’s difficult to put things in. You might conduct this experiment for two weeks and compare how many people recycled before and after your mini-intervention.
Alternatively, you might experiment with nudges in an email. There’s an upcoming event where attendance is voluntary, but you’d like to get more people to show up. Usually, you get a turnout of 60%, but you’d like to get it to 80%. You might begin by saying, “More and more of our employees are coming to these meetings and they’re giving stellar feedback.” You might say, “Eleanor, our Marketing Director, says she truly valued learning about new social media publishing tools at our last event.” You might sign off by telling your colleagues to avoid missing out, because there’s a great guest speaker lined up. You include an easy one-click calendar invite and sit back to count how many people show up to the meeting. You find that employee engagement rises by 25% as a result of that email, at no extra cost to you. You present the findings from your experiment back at the next company meeting, showing the two emails side by side.
#2 Bring your proof point to life
Operating within an agency like Ogilvy gave Jez a massive luxury: access to a world-class creative team with the ability and skill to transform crude behavioural experiments into a story, supported by visual effects, a script and a narrator. If you’re operating in a nascent start-up space, however, you’ve got to be a bit more resourceful. Yes, Jez had hidden cameras filming a boardroom of fully-grown adult jumping bunnies, but anybody with an iPhone can shoot some footage and cobble it together in iMovie. It might not look polished, but it will still bring to life the behavioural changes you’ve influenced. At the very least, it will capture people’s imagination more than documents of text.
#3 Minimise deception to avoid losing trust
An unexpected side effect of running these experiments was that Jez’s colleagues soon started to mistrust his intentions. These experiments were run a couple of months after he joined the company and often involved recruiting participants in an underhand way. For example, he’d sent out a company-wide email offering to upskill colleagues on workshop facilitation skills. After nudging them to jump around like bunnies, he’d later revealed the true purpose of the session. Before long, people grew wary of his motives, and he’d get people questioning whether legitimate and genuine requests were yet another underhand ruse. As such, be careful to limit your duplicity to times when it’s truly necessary.
So where’s the best place to start if you want to apply behavioural science in business? Try running some experiments to bring your ideas to life for your colleagues. Get some evidence to show that it works, bring it life with videos or pictures, but keep it playful. And if you use your colleagues as your experiment participants, then they’ll have some trouble denying that subtle nudges can have an unexpected impact on behaviour.
1 Thaler and Benartzi (2004).
2 TED (2008).
3 Kahneman (2011).
4 Meyers, Stunkard and Coll (1980).
5 Wansink, Painter and van Ittersum (2001).
6 Bargh, Chen and Burrows (1996).
7 Ariely and Loewenstein (2006).
Chapter 2: Babies of the Borough, Greenwich, London
Innovative applications of behavioural science come from serendipitous collisions
Have you ever thought about whether the requirement for scientific rigour might be holding behavioural science back? The field has progressed using the scientific method, whereby hypotheses are tested with rigorous experimentation and the results are interpreted with scepticism. In order to get published, academic research must follow the scientific method’s clear steps and withstand countless rounds of peer reviews. The problem with this process is that it limits creativity within the field.
Both Jez and April are scientists by training. Jez has a background in biology and chemistry, going on to study biochemistry at university, before later falling in love with behavioural science. April felt at home in the objective and unambiguous world of the sciences, studying the field of human behaviour at undergraduate and, later, postgraduate level. There is beauty, both agree, in numbers, data and statistics, but these serve no purpose when behavioural